Chapter 126: The Difference One Reader Makes
A little praise can go a long way for writers. That holds true at opposite ends of their dealings with the page: both in the early skirmishes and, perhaps more importantly, later on, when perceived failures murmur give up. Yet even when a helpful reader does manifest, writers may still be prone to the “Goldilocks Principle”, where the writer needs things “just right”: the awaited opinion should be just so, issued in the right manner, stemming from the right person, whose authority may lift young authors beyond those initial doubts, or for mature writers, belatedly break doubts’ petrified grasp.
It’s one of the many reasons why finding the right reader, teacher, or mentor, with that prized opinion, can seem a bolt from the blue. When it does happen, that person can unlock something, however early or late in the game. Here are two cases in point.
Born in 1861, in the then-Austro-Hungarian city of Trieste, Ettore Schmitz was always destined to follow his father’s footsteps into business. Yet, while his whole German-speaking education was geared toward this end, young Ettore had other aspirations: he would write, and in Italian! Family tragedy soon led him to take any work he could find, and it was his travails as a lowly bank employee that inspired his first novel, A Life, self-published in 1892 under the pseudonym Italo Svevo. Complete critical silence followed.
He tried again six years later with As a Man Grows Older, whose unequivocal failure put an end to any further attempts. Now a family man, he dutifully joined his wife’s family’s varnish company, steadfast in the decision to fulfill his obligations and abandon literature, that “ridiculous and damaging thing.” Actively wanting to avoid a relapse, he sought to replace his suppressed passion with learning the violin.
In 1907, with the family business taking him to England, Ettore Schmitz felt the need to improve his faltering English. Fortunately, there was just the man at the local Berlitz language school, an Irish teacher in his early twenties who had moved to Trieste a couple of years prior. A Mr. James Joyce. The private lessons for the Schmitz spouses soon became fascinating conversations. From the outside, the two men would seem to have little in common: one was a young Catholic, confident in his talent, bad with money and the bottle, a bohemian and a rabble-rouser; the other was Jewish, a family man, becalmed, balding and bourgeois, who had made his peace with conventions. Yet both would come to discover they shared the same urge, though one blossomed and the other was stifled.
In time, the teacher shared his literary aspirations, and though largely unpublished, used some stories he had been working on as class materials (the future Dubliners). To his surprise, Joyce discovered his pupil had once had that same dream. Schmitz was now in mid forties, yet his young friend’s devotion to literature stirred something inside him. He humbly gave him copies of his forgotten works.
When Joyce next saw Schmitz, he stunned him by reciting whole passages back to him. He was full of praise for the important writer he’d just discovered, unjustly neglected by all. Schmitz’s vow to leave literature wasn’t ready to be broken, but the seed was planted. The madness of the First World War separated them, and they would not meet again after 1920, though they corresponded for as long as they both lived.
Joyce went on to write Ulysses and in gushing over that book in a letter, his friend let it slip that the pseudonym Italo Svevo had finally returned, with a vengeance: in 1923, a quarter of a century since his last effort, he’d published a new novel, Zeno’s Conscience. Trieste was an Italian city now, but yet again, no one had batted an eyelash. “Why do you despair?” Joyce wrote back. “You must know it is by far your best book.” From afar, adding actions to words, he enacted what Schmitz called “the miracle of Lazarus.”
By then, Joyce was firmly established in Paris and in international literary circles. He endorsed the work among the vanguard of critics of the time: Larbaud, Crémieux...soon the future Nobel Prize winner Eugenio Montale was championing an unknown master named Svevo. By 1926, a dumbfounded Schmitz was the toast of European salons. He hardly had time to get over his surprise: in an irony worthy of his books, he died only two years later in a car accident, while writing a sequel.
Back in the teaching days, Schmitz devoted one assignment to lovingly sketching his teacher’s gait: Mr. James Joyce described by his faithful pupil Ettore Schmitz. Joyce returned the favor with the Ulysses, in a way. Schmitz’s lasting influence made him an inspiration for Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of his masterpiece.
The two men can still be found walking through Trieste, perhaps on their way to meeting each other: a bronze Joyce paces the bridge over the Grand Canal, while on Piazza Hortis, Schmitz/Svevo’s statue waits for his friend to return.
*
Across the Alps in France, once upon a time in 1870, in the small western city of Charleville, there lived a 15-year-old boy who dreamt of poetry. His mother is devout and strict, his father is long gone, and daily life seems dreary. The first verses he has started to scribble have fed on meager models and literary scraps. His name is Arthur Rimbaud.
Enter Georges Izambard, 22, named professor of rhetoric at the Charleville Lycée that January. Single, more prone to dancing than church, in the know, he breaks with the provincial dreariness. Izambard dotes on his students, especially the “dreamy Little Thumbling, small and shy, quiet and gentle, with clean fingernails, spotless notebooks, and surprisingly correct homework - in short, one of those impeccable, exemplary little monsters that epitomize the superlative school competitor.” There’s nothing to recognize the preternatural rebel, yet change is afoot. The new teacher will have a pivotal role to play in igniting a shooting star.
Every day after class, Arthur walks Izambard home, and on the way they discuss poetry. Eventually, the teenager shares his first attempts with his newfound confidante, all written in lovely calligraphy. Izambard reads these initial manuscripts under the trees of a Charleville promenade. He offers corrections which don’t always sound right, but above all he listens, he is there, and brings books with him: first the medieval poet Villon, then Victor Hugo, whose novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame Arthur’s mother confiscates as impious material. “Let him read everything!” the teacher responds.
Together, the teacher and pupil go over the literary gossip in journals and read Gautier, Baudelaire, and Verlaine, literature that makes the adolescents’ blood boil and inspires his writing.
Decades later, Austrian writer Stefan Zweig will seek out Izambard, who recalls his pupil’s sudden metamorphosis from teacher’s pet into someone "precocious, carried away, brutal (…) who already showed amazing energy at school." When class is out and Izambard is away, he gifts his student an escape from his overbearing mother, and from boredom, by lending him the keys to his apartment and the best bookshelves in town. "Your library, my last lifeline, is exhausted," Arthur writes.
Soon the young man cannot stomach his fate any longer. In a time of upheavals, he dreams of Paris and decides to run away. He will do so six times between fifteen and eighteen. The first two, in the summer and fall of 1870, will bring some of the happiest moments of his youth, as both lead him to the haven of his teacher’s family house, in the town of Douai. On the first visit –after Izambard has bailed him out of jail for skimming on train tickets– he uses his short-lived freedom to write, to polish images from his escape, to enjoy long walks and endless conversations with his friend. He remains a minor and is returned home to a "downpour" of slaps. On the second escape, only a few months later, he will compose some of his most famous poems, in the Douai Notebook. He turns sixteen in Douai on October 20th; that very day, a letter from his mother orders his return by the police.
Rimbaud leaves on November 1st, 1870. On the door of his haven, he takes out a pencil and scribbles a poem, never copied and now lost, which Izambar alone recalls: goodbye to a place where he found writing and happiness. Both will rarely overlap for him.
“En route, I speak to him from my heart, my concern for his future, his glory, his dignity too,” Izambard remembers. “I have the impression that he understands me; that he's moved inside, that his heart is in his throat. Maybe I'm wrong! He's so inscrutable. We arrived and were introduced to the commissioner, who promised me he wouldn't be bullied. We shook hands and bid farewell! That was the last time I saw him.”
Arthur has become Rimbaud; he has taken Izambard’s lessons and will run with them, until utter exhaustion. The teacher will still receive letters, among them one of the most famous in French literature, in May 1871:
“It's about reaching the unknown through the disruption of all the senses. The suffering is enormous, but you have to be strong, born a poet, and I recognized myself as a poet. It's not my fault at all. It's wrong to say: I think: you should say: I am thought. - Pardon the pun. - I is another.”
On the way to fulfilling their vocation, Svevo and Rimbaud found a home for their words in someone, in how one person saw and read them. The readers who served as necessary forerunners for all those to come.
James Joyce’s statue in Trieste.
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